Storm’s Edge

'A surprising page-turner, full of humour and startling details' THE TIMES

'If I read a better history this year, I will be lucky' TOM HOLLAND

'An astonishing tour de force’ SPECTATOR

From Peter Marshall, winner of the 2018 Wolfson Prize, Storm’s Edge is a new history of the Orkney Islands that delves deep into island politics, folk beliefs and community memory on the geographical edge of Britain.

Peter Marshall was born in Orkney. His ancestors were farmers and farm labourers on the northern island of Sanday – where, in 1624, one of them was murdered by a witch. In an expansive and enthralling historical account, Marshall looks afresh at a small group of islands that has been treated as a mere footnote, remote and peripheral, and in doing so invites us to think differently about key events of British history.

With Orkney as our point of departure, Marshall traverses three dramatic centuries of religious, political and economic upheaval: a time when what we think of as modern Scotland, and then modern Britain, was being forged and tested.

Storm's Edge is a magisterial history, a fascinating cultural study and a mighty attestation to the importance of placing the periphery at the centre. Britain is a nation composed of many different islands, but too often we focus on just one. This book offers a radical alternative, encouraging us to reorient the map and travel with Peter Marshall through landscapes of forgotten history.

Reviews

A TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR

'A surprising page-turner, full of humour and startling details… In Storm’s Edge, Marshall set out to ‘make the peripheral central’, and so he has'

The Times

'If I read a better history this year, I will be lucky. A rich, sweeping, moving and often drily funny survey both of Orkney itself, and of Orkney as a vantage point from which to survey much else… Among all its many other qualities, Storm’s Edge is very moving for the pride in his homeland displayed by the author'

Tom Holland

'Engrossing and near-faultless… Orkney already boasts a roll call of distinguished writers. The list has just got longer'

Literary Review

'A brilliantly sweeping and gloriously detailed history of Orkney that is also a history of Britain, and ultimately of the world. Memories of the sheer pleasure it gave me are warming me still'

TLS, Tom Holland

'Peter Marshall’s new, very readable history of the archipelago is a wonderful corrective to our tendency to see Scottish history through a lowland lens… I have, I am ashamed to say, never been to Orkney. But reading Marshall’s book might just tempt me to make the journey'

The Herald

'A remarkable and wonderful book — extraordinary in both scale and erudition’

Church Times

About the author

Peter Marshall is a Scottish historian and academic who was born and raised in the Orkney Islands. He is Professor of History at the University of Warwick, a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Marshall won the prestigious Wolfson History Prize in 2018 for his book Heretics and Believers.